King Of The Dead!

So it’s the second project already and it’s a group one! Yay….

Nah I’m kidding. I am looking forward to it. From the issues from the last group project I was sceptical however that was mainly cause of certain issues. Luckily with this group that wasn’t the case and I actually felt confident.

So the title was “King of the Dead”. We are a small time company and a game studio has approached us! Wooo! We’ve got to give them evidence that we can quickly produce both quality work and original ideas. We’ve negotiated with the games studio to produce a small environment that contains a character sat on a throne with one wall and one floor. Sounds pretty good so far. This will give them a chance to judge our skills in environment, prop and character work. We’ve been given 2 weeks to produce this work.

2spooky4me

First of all we got together in our group which consisted of 4 people. We started by spreading round ideas and telling each other what we had in mind when we first were given the brief. The ideas that went round were mostly based around the Mexican Day of the Dead. However we had a fun idea of creating in a game show way. It was different when we first thought of it but it had a lot of connections to death. We were heading down the path of a game show like “The Wheel of Fortune” and possibly making the game show miniature on a shrine that is seen a lot on the Mexican Day of the Dead. We looked further into the meaning and depth and found that there were some gods which we could include. In the end we decided to take influence from both the Aztec and Spanish Day of the Dead festivals with a wheel of fortune type game show which is over looked by “Mictecacihuatl” the queen of the underworld. She was to act as a host of the game show. We looked at various Aztec designs and shrines to come up with some concepts.

We liked the idea however it was coming to a dead end and wasn't original. It was just becoming more of a throne room. So before it was too late we changed our idea to something different, something more obscure. We decided to go for a wage slave employee. We decided to create some subtle hints that would link the character to be known as Death himself. He were trying to picture him in a cubical office with stacks of paper work. We didn't want him skin and bones so we decided to make him fat and greasy. We wanted to go away from the traditional skeleton grim reaper. A good idea was to add “Employee of the Month” on the walls but maybe change it to “Employee of the Century” to signify that he's been there for a very, very long time. So with that we went ahead and created concepts in which we could work from.

Spongebob has the idea

However the same thing happened again, and we changed our minds. We decided to make our character a politician. However that idea changed swiftly to a War General. This was to give the idea that he was The King of the Dead. We didn't want to make it too controversial but we wanted it to make an impact. It was sceptical at first but we felt confident in what we could do. There are many stories behind our character but it was to mostly signify that at the end of the day he is The King of the Dead. We created mood boards, concepts, whiteboxes and felt that this was stable and went ahead to bring everything together. We got a lot of our inspiration from “The Incredibles” and the “Pixar” style. We used a colour palette similar to “The Incredibles” especially with the textures of the Characters and the lighting around the character.

Best film ever!

So in the end that’s where we ended up. A grumpy skinny general in a war room. That’s what we did in the end and that’s what we were happy with. We took a lot of inspiration from “The Incredibles” and it was definitely the worth the work.

All in all I have really enjoyed this project and it’s been really eye opening working in an efficient group who works well with each other. I’ve felt my concepting has become better especially when working with a whitebox for help. Over time I think my concepting will become much more efficient but overall I am really happy about how everything turned out!

If it was a project by myself I would have changed it to something different. I’m not 100% sure what I would change it to but possibly make it more significant or work more on engine work and particles to create the king of the dead and add something more to it. I did still like the game show and would probably pursue that more.

So here are some pretty screenshots of our final level.

Year 3 and into the deep!

So my first blog post of a new year at Uni! So it’s year 3 and in the deep end of it all. It’s time to think of FMP ideas and to most likely scrap everything! But that’ll be a different blog post. For now I’m going to talk about the first project we were giving which was our PBR Texture Project.

So with the release of UE4 I was pretty excited for this project. I wanted to get used to UE4 and have a look at what it has to offer me. Hopefully this time it isn’t as buggy. However what is this metalness and roughness. When I first heard this I really didn’t understand what was going on. It was like I was starting from the beginning again. Well I actually was, but you know what I mean. Although I had a face of pure confusion while hearing about these metalness and roughness maps I felt like it was the start of something new.

 

It was fitting. Don't judge

So having got this project I went out and took some textures. Now I didn’t really know what was going on and ended up taking a trip to Yo!Sushi for food. Cause who doesn’t like sushi?! Even so headed back and started working on my textures. I was ready to start making tileable textures to apply to the texture balls in UE4. We were giving a level template which had the texture balls already named. We just had to create our own textures to apply to the balls.

So in having all the tileable textures done it was time to make the metalness and roughness maps. So to start with I was randomly change the values between white and black and all the grey in-between until I created the right material. I added in some normal onto certain materials such as rust to give it that bit more of a definition. I thought I would understand metalness and roughness but even at the end of the project I’m still wondering how it works. When I thought it was right and it’d make iron look metal it made it look matte. Which confused me. In the end I just kept tweaking the textures until they were right within engine. It’s not a good way to go about it but hopefully with time I will be able to figure it out. I really enjoyed this exercise and sorting out what material needed what property was fun and interesting.

It also has been good to start learning particle effects as well. I hope to get better at these particle effects and learn other ways of creating them and changing them within Unreal. With the spark particle effects I found that it only came out across one plane. I wanted the sparks to come out from all different directions when they spawn and possibly make it circle around the mystical ball before they die. With the smoke as well I have found it difficult to control and get more a mist feel rather than a smokey feel. This probably meant more tweaking and possibly a new particle, however by using the smoke particle I was able to change it in some of the ways I wanted it to look. The only other issue I have with the smoke is that when you look at the smoke in a specific direction the colour changes to black. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it but it will be something I come away with knowing to sort it out in the future.

So here is some pretty renders of my balls.

All together now!!

Happy little family!

It's so pretty!